What is The Phabulous Cafe?

The Phabulous Cafe idea starts with The Phab Shop... The Phab Charity Shop was set up in 2012, it's main aim to provide volunteers with additional needs with training, experience, confidence, and skills in the retail sector. Today we are a thriving charity shop having helped over 200 people with additional needs, giving them confidence, creating friendships and the opportunity to show their talents, creativeness, and skills to the world!

Why?

Support and opportunities for people with additional needs drops dramatically once a young person reached 16/18 years of age. Reducing these opportunities leads to fewer opportunities for socialising and therefore an increased risk of isolation, and a low sense of self-worth as their employability status can be extremely low. This can have a huge impact on a person’s mental health, wellbeing and confidence. We wanted to change that. That's when The Phab Charity shop was born.

Today we have over 30 volunteers with additional needs, needing various levels of support from one-to-one support, to support being on hand when needed. Last year, two of our volunteers moved onto full time paid employment!

Elise (Phab Shop Volunteer): "I love meeting new people and making new friends. I love all the different jobs like sorting donations and serving customers. and I love all the support we give each other, we're one big family"

Dean (Phab Shop volunteer): "I love the shop because if you have got any problems at home, when you get here you forget all about it."

Daniel (Phab Shop volunteer): " I can't believe how much I've achieved in the time I've spent at The Phab Shop and how far I've come... from being shy, nervous, lack of confidence and self-esteem to having bags of confidence and making friends left, right and center!"

Matthew (Phab Shop Volunteer): "It's good fun, I like going on the till, steaming clothes and organising the jewellery."

So how can we make this even better?... I hear you ask

We now have a fantastic opportunity to help more people in a different area of the retail world... we are opening our very own... Phabulous Cafe! This cafe will be run by people with additional needs with one to one support from The Phab Shop team. Another fantastic opportunity to gain real-life skills in the food industry.

As with The Phab Shop, The Phabulous Cafe will provide free training to our volunteers for however long they would like to continue volunteering. Outside of the shop, we have regular meetups where all the volunteers get together to have a meal out, another opportunity to help build confidence and social skills. We also organise team building days and special events and are hoping to expand these opportunities with The Phabulous Cafe.

This is the part where you come in...

To get this project going and to give it a fighting chance of succeeding we need your support. We need to raise £5000. Although the building has previously been run as a cafe it is in much need of some tlc. We need to replace some equipment and give the cafe a makeover that will be inviting to customers and create that warm welcome The Phab Shop is known to give.